Bitcoin Hardfork !? Small rant

Hiktayms almost every day is filled with articles about how bad hardfork and what a terrible two virgins who decided to make it.

Let's take a closer look at the example of the previous article and publish a good answer to the opponents of Bitcoin XT.

In the cryptocurrency community, the heated debate on increasing the maximum size of a bitcoin block does not abate.

Debates do not subside only in the mailing lists of developers and on the githaba, because there the hands of proprietary and all sorts of materially interested personalities are short.
Consider the example of leading discussion sites:
Theymos the owner of bitcointalk.org and the reddit / r / bitcoin administrator completely block any discussions or nullify them. Blocked and deleted posts and people posted information about Bitcoin XT.
On the Bitcoin forum, talking about it is prohibited, the only topic was moved to Altcoins, although at the moment the blockchain is the same for both clients.
')

The block size limit has been a controversial issue over the past few years. Initially, Satoshi Nakamoto imposed a limit of 1 megabyte as a measure against spam. Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn have long and aggressively promoted the idea of ​​increasing the size of Bitcoin blocks 20 times "to improve scalability." Such manipulations with the network are possible only by means of hard forks (introducing compulsory fundamental changes to the basic Bitcoin protocol). However, this position contradicts the opinion of 80% of Bitcoin Core developers, who do not believe that a sharp increase in block size is such a great idea. They fear that the decentralization of the system will be the first victim of the transaction count.

Indeed, why do we need a decentralized currency? In fact, the problem is in possible centralization due to the cost of network traffic, which is nonsense, as can be seen below.

In fact, with a 20 megabyte block size, which also increases by 40% annually, the blockchain size will very quickly begin to be counted not by tens or hundreds of gigabytes, as now, but by terabytes, and then petabytes. This means that no Bitcoin user will very soon be able to use the full client on his PC or smartphone, limited to light versions depending on centralized servers. Independent bitcoin nodes will also come to naught: only the largest operators such as payment processors and services like Circle and Coinbase will be able to afford full-fledged bitcoin nodes, which will require huge costs for information storage and processing.

The initial increase will be up to 8 megabytes, which is approximately equal to 2 pages of the site yaplakal.ru or 10 pages reddit.com.
A full client has long been not used on mobile phones, all such clients are SPV. Any person with a speed higher than 10 megabits / sec will be able to place a full block of a node without problems, at least until the node is not comfortable. However, with speeds of 1 gigabit for 15 euros in the EU, there will be no problems even with 100 megabyte blocks. But this pro-miniblock (bitcoin core) doesn't care.

Huge blocks will be transferred over the network for a very long time, which means the irrevocable centralization of mining: only a few of the largest pools and industrial mining farms connected by dedicated high-speed lines will be able to exchange these giant blocks in time and participate in mining, and for any individual miners to enter this market will be finally closed. Thus, mining, nodes and services will very quickly be centralized in the hands of a handful of players.

Which again is rubbish and the miners themselves stated this more than once. The cost of a symmetric guaranteed 10 gigabit ranges from 500 euros to 3,000 euros, which is a penny for miners. Compared with the possible profit from transactional payments.

In his publication on Medium, Mike Hirn interprets Satoshi Nakamoto's old quotations as support for his solution to the problem of block size limits. But on the same day, Satoshi Nakamoto or someone under his pseudonym denied Hearn's statements. Someone using Satoshi’s previously uncompromised email address posted a message in the mailing list for developers. He claims to be the founder of Bitcoin and is closely following the issue. Satoshi Nakamoto called this fork "very dangerous." It seems that the creator of Bitcoin is unhappy with a possible network split, following the adoption of this alt fork by part of the community (while the rest will remain on the Bitcoin Core).

About the creator of the network, we can say that he is a materially interested person. In addition, he himself pointed out that 1 megabyte is rather small enough for “time”. Moreover, it was he who handed over the reins to Gavin. He also owns the key of the bitcoin alert, which he did not use for such a message. Its text was not signed.

In July, the Bitcoin network underwent another stress test: a spam attack carried out by someone with deep knowledge of the basic bitcoin protocol had significantly slowed the network down for 8 hours. Many Bitcoiners agree that the purpose of the test was clearly to draw community attention to the block size problem. Responsibility for this attack took Coinwallet.

Coinwallet.eu first made itself felt a few months ago, and its appearance immediately caused many questions. The website looks like a stub, the legal address does not say anything, because the office exists only in the cloud, the phone number is never available, the employees act anonymously.

And of course leading developers are to blame. But what to do if someone deliberately does this to manipulate the market? For some reason, it does not frighten the supporters of small blocks? Perhaps because they do not see the payment system in Bitcoin, but only a free witness and PR for their products? Then the cost of bitcoin they do not care what fits with the truth.

However, for some reason, the person who posted this post did not see or did not want to see the engagement of the opponents of the fork and the fact that many of them are developing either proprietary solutions or third-party offchain solutions for payments. It is in their interest to keep the bitcoin network small in order to serve the users themselves.

More detailed information about the current problem and alternatives can be found here en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy